God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America [Paperback]

Hanna Rosin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2008

Since 2000, America’s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the nation’s capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. And God’s Harvard grooms these students to be the elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, to wage the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following the students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Envisioned by its founder as a "Christian equivalent of the Ivy League," Patrick Henry College positions itself as a training ground for God's cultural soldiers to take on the secular mainstream; at the seven-year-old Virginia school for evangelicals, religion and political journalist Rosin reports, girls are warned by e-mail if their bra strap is showing, dating requires parental permission and students fast forward through sex scenes in movies. Though they might seem out of touch, students here are as ambitious as any Ivy Leaguers, interning in the White House and Hollywood, volunteering on political campaigns and doggedly pursuing studies like baraminology (creationist biology). Having spent a year and a half immersed in the campus culture, Rosin weaves a deft and honest narrative of evangelical education, combining historical background (the roots of evangelism, the story of founder Michael Farris), close observation and skeptical wit. Among other students and faculty, Rosin introduces Derek, the fresh-faced, idealistic political volunteer; and Farahn, who gave up dancing for the Lord. Making it clear that the American evangelical population is growing in political and cultural influence, Rosin provides an illuminating, accessible guide to the beliefs, aspirations and ongoing challenges of its next generation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Patrick Henry College, just outside the nation's capital, is a small school preparing Christian Fundamentalist youth to become the elite of the future, permeating politics and American culture to change what they see as an ungodly nation. Washington Post reporter Rosin spent a year and a half among the faithful, watching the efforts of school founder Michael Farris to mold the next generation of evangelicals. She follows the lives of students, nearly all of them previously homeschooled, as they cope with college life, the world of Washington politics, and questions about their faith and their futures. Farahn, a ballet dancer, is an attractive, somewhat cynical misfit, who struggles through the year. Daniel Noa is trying to reconcile his conservative persona at school with the greater tolerance of his hometown of Hollywood, where growing numbers of Christian filmmakers are making their mark. Elisa is a bright, earnest young woman, chafing at the expectations that she will curb her ambitions and devote herself to a future husband and children. A captivating look at struggles within the conservative movement. Bush, Vanessa --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156034999
• ISBN-13: 978-0156034999
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #327,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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45 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Putting Evangelicals in Congress, October 6, 2007

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The Spinozanator "Spinozanator" (Harlingen, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Hardcover)

Several intertwined stories:

*How several overly-religious, over-achieving youngsters cope with a new and unique overly-religious, over-achieving college.

*How these students decide where to draw the line when it comes to participation in today's seductive secular culture - with the help of prayer, a personal relationship with Jesus, and Patrick Henry College's conduct manual and "snitch" policy.

*How an attorney, who made a career out of representing the interests of home-schooling parents, opened an evangelical college designed to put high achieving home-schoolers on a career path leading to politics. Student volunteers are given time off to assist the Republicans during each election cycle. A huge number of them get positions assisting Republican Congressmen and Senators in Washington DC during their off time.

*How these kids have been taught since birth that God is on the side of the Republican Party.

Patrick Henry College must tweak a continuous balancing act to maintain their offense and defense against secularism. Founder and President Michael Farris would like PHC to be part of the movement that would return the United States to be the God-fearing society it believes the founding fathers intended. This means an education that enhances a working knowledge of and working relationship with the enemy. That knowledge, at times, enhances the inadvertent defection of some of their brightest stars to the dark side.

Robert Stacey, PhD, consistently was a role model and favored teacher at Patrick Henry. Among other things, he caused students to question whether, for example, Bush's every move had been the correct one, and whether, in truth, all the founding fathers were as religious as these home-schoolers had always been taught. Jennifer Gruenke, PhD, taught biology. She didn't believe in evolution but she taught it - on the basis that you have to know the correct theory in order to honestly oppose it. She also taught alternatives - intelligent design and even a 10,000 year old earth inhabited by a naked lady and a snake, as portrayed in Genesis.

These instructors and several others are no longer at Patrick Henry. They resigned en mass when Farris tried to enforce a more Biblical code on their curriculum - caving in to complaints from home-schooling parents.

Not my cup of tea, nor is it the author's, who is a journalist specializing in religion and is a non-practicing Jew. In the hands of other authors, this book could have been a scathing indictment of a Taliban-like fundamentalist sinkhole - or it could have presented PHC to be a suger-coated nirvana-land, but she has done neither. For a year and a half she was granted freedom to the campus and to those who live and work there. She is open-mindedly empathetic, but realistic about them.

It appears PHC will be a significant force in the future, influencing politics and culture wherever they think they can. This is a very interesting, timely book and I recommend it.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars God's "New" Harvard Looks Like God's "Old" Harvard, May 5, 2008

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A. Tatusko "http://notes-from-offcenter.com" (Duncansville, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Hardcover)

In God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America Hanna Rosin, Washington Post correspondent, was embedded in the environment of the Patrick Henry College student for a year and reports what she witnessed and learned.

Patrick Henry College is a very small institution, but also newly founded under the clear authority of its president Michael Farris, a Christian homeschool advocate and clear supporter of the link between political conservativism and orthodox evangelical Christianity. The story she tells shows us remarkable resilience and fortitude of the students of this institution Farris can coined "God's Harvard". Indeed it's students will be among the elite of all secondary school graduates much less the creme of the crop among homeschooled teens. The student body which boasts a rather generous helping of homeschooled undergraduates alone supports any assertion that homseschooled teens can compete with the best and brightest of all high school graduates.

Rosin tells tales of highly competitive students who are in the throes of political training at Patrick Henry. these students have unprecedented access to Washington with a clear sense of mission and pride about their task to reform American government to be something in which God can exercise domain and rule. That God is not currently doing so is at the very heart of the curriculum. In any college, one would be thrilled to have such a critical mass of bright and passionate students and this is part of the picture that Rosin paints for us.

There is, of course, another side to the story. This side is the authoritarian nature of the administration with a special emphases on Michael Farris and Dean of Students Bob Wilson. There are very clear limitations on behavior and dress along with unwritten expectations of the role of women along the lines of clear complementarianism. Infallibilism of Scripture is not only preached from the pulpit at mandatory chapel services, but it is a clear expectation to be integrated into all facets of the curriculum. And more than just integrated, but this view of Scripture should hold all other forms of knowledge as a contingency upon its truth. To wit, the biology program focuses on a rather odd anomaly in biology called baraminology, which is a taxonomic system that re-casts speciation in terms of what was likely to have been the case in the literal six day creation of Genesis (see Ch. 8, 183 ff.). History and politics are taught with the indubitable assumption that the founders intended to favor evangelical Christianity as the structure in which government and civility would be administered. So this is not just about abortion and gay rights. These are only symptomatic issues of a wider evangelical worldview that hold the structure of quite literally everything in different terms and under different standards of truth compared to even other evangelical colleges (Rosin points out differences with Wheaton College in a few key places such as science).

Finally, the ethical administration of the behavioral code is brought out in Rosin's stories of a few students that she followed intently. Chapter 7 "Den of Sin" (p. 167 ff.) recounts one such conflict in which one student informed the administration of behavior infractions of other students whom he had befriended.

"Someone was getting expelled. No, five people were getting expelled, or maybe three. A couple of them were Farahn's friends. Rumor was that the boys had been caught drinking, smoking, abusing prescription painkillers, and possibly cheating on exams. No wait, they had not been caught. They had been turned in by one of their roommates. He had written a long letter to the dean of students (p. 168)."

The problem here is not so much that students get caught and punished for such behaviors. The problem is that the institution made as part of its rules that students should hold each other accountable if they catch another breaking any rule to any degree. Rosin's tale shows that this has created among many of the students a culture of distrust and paranoia rather than one of moral fortitude.

Indeed, Rosin points out such details with the tone of a mother who feels bad for these children; that in spite of their brightness and passion in what they do, there is a stir of conflict that rages beneath the surface. The college's position is to use biblical infallibilism to hammer any such conflict into submission with perhaps a follow-through of a hug and even an "I love you" from the Dean. But with he influence of Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right conservatives who support Farris unflinchingly there is a clear pejorative tone to Rosin's narrative even in terms of the homseschooling environments from which many of these students came.

"Experimental communities almost always implode. One faction wants to hold on to the purest version of the mission while another begs for a little fresh air. The men fight for power, while trying to protect an image of unified authority. But eventually, their adoring subjects catch on" (p. 257).

For PHC, such an implosion was the resignation of four professors who did not support the same premises of Farris in their classrooms. Indeed, it is clear that for Farris, this version of "God's Harvard" hearkens back to the ante-bellum Harvard itself, perhaps more so of Yale. But this is even more radical in its understanding of the evangelical nature of government and the role of the student. This is an interesting and thought-provoking engagement of a new kind of evangelical college that seeks to dissociate itself from the controversies of Falwell and Robertson, but maintains a clear kinship in its very mission.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, Humane Work of Cultural Anthropology, February 21, 2008

By 

James J. Paul (Raleigh, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Hardcover)

This is a very humane, sometimes amusing, occasionally sharp-eyed, often sympathetic look at a determined subculture.

It is not a chronological narrative but a series of episodes--detailed snapshots illuminating the lives of Patrick Henry students and faculty. Thankfully, Mrs. Rosin doesn't limit her focus to the campus itself, but shows these characters within larger frameworks--the home schooling movement, the ID movement, politicking, and Christian filmmaking.

You feel as if you know these characters--Farahn the (somewhat) rebellious student, fiercely determined PHC founder Tim Farris, good-hearted young Mr. Archer--in the round, as if they were old friends.

Mrs. Rosin's curiosity and open-minded humanity have given birth to an excellent book--perhaps a classic of cultural anthropology and sociology.

A must-read.